Zhuangzi’s Dao as Background Noise

Frank W. Stevenson

In the Qi Wu Lun, “Discourse on Making Things Equal,” an extended meditation on

the relativity and “equilibrium” of all things/meanings, Zhuangzi asks how we can finally

distinguish from one another the claims of rival philosophical schools, given that it is not

clear how we could even distinguish “this” (是shi, “it is,” predication, affirmation of a

position) from “that” (非fei, “it is not,” negation of a predicate or position).1 The problem is

that words, propositions, assertions and negations—“X,” “This is (not) X,” “This is (not) an

X”—have no fixed meaning: “Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if

what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say

nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there

any difference or isn’t there?” (Watson 34)

Here it seems we are left in an ambivalent state with regard to the possibility of

(consistent, stable) “meaning”; we are left suspended between two views, one that takes

meaning as possible (“words have something to say”) and one that sees it as (strictly

speaking) impossible (“what they say is not fixed”). Hansen takes Dao as a “discourse” that

guides human actions; he sees Zhuangzi as having many discourse-daos rather than the

Confucian authoritative (“one and correct”) discourse-Dao:

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. . . Zhuangzi does not claim that all shi-ing [asserting] is wrong because the absolute

is without any distinctions. He claims instead that all shi-ing is right—from some

perspective or other. He does not claim that all language is pei-perverse but that all is

admissible—in some conventional practice or another.

“There is no limit to what you can shi and . . . what you can fei. So I say nothing is

better than clarity” [Zhuangzi]. Ming/clarity is apparently to be understood here as the

awareness that there is a possible dao which would generate any desired pattern of

shi-ing and fei-ing. Whatever pattern of response we adopt becomes a way. The

conventionality and artificiality of daos and language are underlined again. (46)

This view of dao(s) is of course also not that of the primitive Daoism of Shen Dao, which

refuses to adopt any system of discrimination and thus sees “all things as one.” Rather, the

“mature Daoist” view attributed by Hansen to Zhuangzi seems in effect to “mime” or “play

off of” Confucianism: “. . . Zhuangzi goes on to pragmatic endorsement of ‘residing in the

usual’—using names and shiing in the conventional, shared, therefore useful and

understandable ways.” Such a reading would seem to fit the various aspects of Zhuangzi’s

playfulness. Yet Hansen (48) also acknowledges Zhuangzi’s claim—a seemingly “serious”

if not also “mystical” one—that “[Conformist shiing2] comes to an end; and when it is at an

end, that of which we do not know what is so of it we call [the] dao.”

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Hansen’s reading of the Qi Wu Lun is persuasive, especially given the very Daoist

proviso that (as he says) this reading implies that the “opposite” (Confucianist or mystical

monist) reading is equally defensible, that no reading needs any “defense.”3 Still we must

wonder: are we taking dao here strictly as action-guiding discourse, and/or as that which

“mimics” (“plays along with” or even “parodies”) such discourse and thus itself becomes a

sort of meta-action-guiding discourse, and/or as something a bit more unfathomable (“dao

is that of which we do not know . . .”), a sort of epistemological if not also ontological gap,

suspension, conundrum or paradox? Furthermore, does the second (mimetic) sense,

inasmuch as it lacks its own “essence,” perhaps become a case of the third? But consider

Hansen’s comment (47) on the “peeps of baby birds” passage cited above, whose last

phrase I quote again in his translation:

“If you think that saying is different from the twitter of fledglings, can you prove a

distinction or is there no distinction?” Language seems to have a certain “aboutness.”

Zhuangzi suggests that if nothing can “fix” what language is about, then there is no

reason to distinguish it from any other sounds in nature. . . . If that relation [of

language to reality] constantly changes, how are we to explain the difference between

language and sounds? . . . all such ways of speaking are equally natural. All are part of

the sound of nature. . . . Our judgments . . . are noises made in a context and from a

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perspective framed by systems of judgment . . . . None is privileged or absolute. . . . all

judgments are possible from some particular perspective.

It now seems that Zhuangzi’s relativistic shi-ing, as mere natural “noise,” might not be an

action-guiding discourse at all—though perhaps it could still, on this view, be a sort of parody

of such a discourse (as a barking dog might seem to mock, or someone barking like a dog

might really mock, a speech by the President)—and indeed that it might not even be anything

we would normally think of as a rational, coherent, communicable “judgment”; the blur of “all

possible judgments” from any given perspective might in fact be indistinguish- able from the

“sound(s) of nature.” If logical, epistemological and metaphysical claims on the purely

“linguistic” level may result in ethical action on the pragmatic level (dao as action-guiding

discourse), these same claims (as mere sounds in a language system enclosed within a wider

“sonic field,” within an encompassing physical universe) may also “decay” into noise or (from

the rational human perspective) nonsense.

“Words are not just wind” is, after all, not a randomly chosen image; it further develops

the extended metaphor which opens the Qi Wu Lun: “The Great Clod (da kuai, Earth or Dao)

belches out breath and its name is wind,” a wind/breath which plays the “pipes” of nature’s

“holes.”4 It seems to me that we might simply begin from a picture or model of Zhuangzi’s

Dao/daos as the “background noise” of an encompassing nature, without falling into mystical

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monism (or Confucian authoritarianism) but rather maintaining the crucial ambivalence of a

Dao that is both linguistic (possessing human meaning) and supra-linguistic. The various

levels of human “meaning” that emerge out of this background—natural sounds, nonsensical

human sounds, the chaotic mixture or “babel” of rational human statements (can we clearly

distinguish these three?), individually discriminated rational statements, the beliefs and

(individual- or socially-guiding) actions incurred by these statements—could then be taken as

so many kinds (perhaps stages) of manifestation from or refinement of this background. Here

then I would like to suggest a reading of Zhuangzi’s Dao in the Qi Wu Lun which takes Dao as

the background noise that stands “behind” all human language/meaning, or “between” its

specifications—like static behind and between the tuned-in radio stations—as its/their field of

potential emergence. In beginning from this pre-linguistic field of Dao we are beginning at the

extreme limit of language, on the margin between language and non-language, in an

undifferentiated field that includes all human and man-made (e.g. traffic) sounds/noises as well

as all the sounds/noises of nature (animals, wind, sea)— that is, all “sound-daos” or

“noise-daos.”5

Certain elements of Michel Serres’ elaboration of physical chaos theory (or non-linear

dynamics) which seem to support this interpretation of the Dao will also be brought into play.

The chaos theory model is very roughly this: all “bodies” (systems, orders, things) self-order

through random repetition out of chaotic atomic flows and finally decay back again into these

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flows; we can equally well “read” it the other way around, beginning with the flow from order

to disorder and ending with the re-ordering” flow.6 What at first may seem to be a cycle is

perhaps more accurately seen as a sort of Gestalt-switch between two “virtually equivalent”

flows or directions of change.7 Thus all orders are in effect temporary orders of disorder and

vice versa; again the sense of virtuality (virtual equivalence), the Gestalt-switch. On the first,

purely physical level, this chaos-theory model then suggests Dao as a disorder which

self-orders (into bodies/systems) and then decays or dissipates into disorder, where we could as

well begin with the hyper-ordered Dao as with the chaotic Dao. This self- ordering or

self-organizing works through the repetition or duplication of parts/elements to form, say, a

physical universe which would then decay back into non-similar, non-duplicated,

non-repeating particles.8 But why does the hyper-ordered state (Dao) then begin to decay?

Chaos theory speaks of a kind of saturation point at which “terminal equilibrium” is reached;

at this point, in effect, thus must be a move back toward increasing randomness and

non-repetition in order for future (re)ordering to be possible. We can also see the terminal state

of excessive repetition (redundancy) as Gestalt-switching back to the initial state of

randomness and disorder; that is, excessive order is already disorder.9

There are obvious ambiguities or paradoxes with this view of a physical Dao-universe.

For instance, the chaotic background-Dao would seem to be “differentiated” (as non-repeating

particles or flows) in comparison to the “undif- ferentiated” ordering-through-repetition or

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duplication of elements/bodies; yet in another sense it is ordered bodies which are

differentiated (in their homogeneous logical structures) over against the undifferentiated

“continuum” (perhaps Lao-tzu’s Dao as “uncarved block”) of the background. A similar, or

converse, dilemma will appear when we try to analyze the structure of hyper-order, pure

repetition/redundancy: it looks like an undifferentiated continuum, A=A=A, yet the logical

tautology A=A depends on there being at least two A’s that are minimally differentiated. And

indeed at least one of the two “limit-states,” background-disorder or hyper-order, would

apparently need to be “paradoxical” in this way in order for the reversal or switch to occur.

Here of course we are also left wondering: is the move toward progressive self-ordering of the

background a move toward increasing differentiation and/or non-differentiation?

But here I am proposing to interpret Dao as “background noise,” as “pre- linguistic” and

thus also “linguistic” (or “discursive”). The move from the purely physical level of chaos

theory to this linguistic/discursive level, which is of course suggested primarily by Zhuangzi’s

own text, hardly removes the basic ambiguities or paradoxes but may at least help to “clarify”

them. Two aspects of Serres’ development of chaos theory seem especially relevant to the

background- noise reading of Dao. First, Serres suggests in Genesis that all human

sounds/meanings/languages can be seen, from a certain very “detached” perspective, as having

been tuned-in out of the wider natural (and ultimately cosmic) background noise, back into

which they inevitably decay or merge (in a presumably continuing cycle); that is, once we

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place language and even logic within the wider domain of chaos theory/non-linear dynamics,

“chaos” also means nonsense or “noise.” Secondly, Serres claims (as in The Parasite) that the

state of hyper-order or redundancy reached by self-ordering bodies (systems) is the

noise/nonsense of formal-logical tautology, of the “A=A” alluded to above— and the mention

of formal logic implied that we were already within a linguistic- discursive context—which in

fact “tells us nothing we did not already know.”10

In The Parasite Serres develops this notion in relation to information (or communication)

theory. The key idea is that a too-efficient communication between two parties (A and B)

becomes redundant (A=A=A . . .); thus any two-way “signal” needs a certain amount of

background noise to interrupt it, thereby preventing it from reaching the terminal state of

“information death.”11 We may also see this noise as the “spacing” (as with radio static

between stations) between meaning elements or bits of information, a spacing which would

allow for instance the possibly noisy/nonsensical “Whattimeisit?” to become the much clearer

“What time is it?” But now another seeming ambiguity (paradox) arises: noise is needed to

interrupt a two-way “signal” lest it become hyper-ordered or noisy in another way/sense. On

the one hand we can see this interrupting noise as the chaotic background which still (virtually)

“grounds” the movement toward progressive ordering or clarifying of the signal—for too

much noise in the background, like “static” when you are talking on the telephone, will of

course make communication impossible. On the other hand we can see it as marking the

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beginning of the reversal from the state of hyper-ordered noise (called by Serres “blank chaos”)

in Genesis back to the state of disorderly noise (“dark chaos”). But inasmuch as Serres sees

this reversal from blank to dark chaos as a necessary “renewal” or “regeneration” of what

otherwise becomes the indefinitely suspended state (terminal equilibrium) of that “other” noise,

the nonsensical redundancy of hyper-order, there do really seem to be two different kinds of

noise here, the “blank” noise of terminal equilibrium and the “dark” noise which (hopefully)

“kick-starts” this equilibrium, so that “order” can regenerate itself. Still, a reading in the light

of pervasive virtuality may once again be possible: the opposite directions of flow (and thus

the two noises) may still be virtually equivalent, or to put it in other words, the 妙

miao-subtlety and 徼jiao-manifestation may be “the same but come out with different names”

(tong chu er yi ming, Laozi 1).12

Here then I want to develop this notion of background-Dao (as a way of approaching the

Qi Wu Lun) in three steps. First I will briefly review what should already seem an obvious

quality of Zhuangzi’s Dao, one it shares with Laozi’s: this Dao emerges or refines itself into

progressively ordered stages (levels) of language or rationality but with a constant sense of

“nostalgia,” a sense that it wants to “return” to the initial, undifferentiated state, is perhaps

(always) already returning to it. Secondly I will suggest a reading of two of the Qi Wu Lun’s

rhetorical strategies, the infinitely recursive sentence (“There is a not yet beginning to be a not

yet beginning to be a beginning . . .”) and the “rhetorical” question which is simultaneously an

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“unanswerable” one (“do they really say something?” “. . . is there any difference . . . ?”),

taking these as forms of hyper-order, redundancy, blank chaos. That is, already at Dao’s

extreme limit of manifestation these rhetorical structures will tend to revert back or open into

the underlying “equilibrium” of background noise/Dao. Finally, I will conclude by looking at

Dao’s “doubleness” or “virtuality” as a function of its 隱 yin “dependency” or

“withdrawnness”: this pattern of “virtuality” also fits the relationship between noise and

emergent sound/meaning. Thus I will interpret Zhuangzi’s parable of the “withdrawnness” of

the deeper ground of “big saying”13 (“indefinite discourse,” now read as “background noise”)

in relation to the praxis of questioning and of wu yong zhi wei yong, “useful uselessness.”

Dao’s Negative Development and the Problem of Reversion14

I am then in effect suggesting that we look at Zhuangzi’s qi-equal (or qi-even) of the

Qi Wu Lun—“Discourse on Making Things Equal” or “Discourse on Evening Things

Out”—in the light (or darkness) of background noise. The character qi (齊) depicts “stalks

of grain in a field,” thus “even, orderly, neat, together, complete” (Harbaugh 362); Wieger15

defines it as “whole, regular and perfect, harmony” and explains: “The idea comes from the

even height of ears in a cornfield. There is, in this character, an intention of representing the

perspective. The [lower of the two horizontal strokes near the bottom of the character]

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represents the fore-ground; the upper stroke represents the back-ground. The ears are

ascending when going towards the back-ground” (339). I assume this simply embodies the

natural fact that when we look at a flat (even or equal in height) cornfield from the “normal

perspective” the part further from us appears to be “higher.” Of course, this does not mean

that the “plane” or “smooth surface” of original Dao (we think too of Laozi’s “uncarved

block”), in being qi-“level,” possesses an actual doubleness; it might however suggest a sort

of “virtual” doubleness. After all, we not only want to avoid absolute monism (or any sort of

absolute); we also want to emphasize background Dao’s pre-linguistic nature as a

linguistic/non-linguistic (or supra-linguistic) “betweenness.” And if we take this as a

dynamic betweenness (or “suspension”) then we cannot be sure whether we are moving

toward greater linguisticality (rationality, order) or greater non-linguisticality

(non-rationality, disorder).

The notion that qi-evenness/equality itself already involves a certain “virtual” duality

or interplay of foreground/background, perhaps even of image/ground as in Gestalt

psychology, is useful when we ponder Zhuangzi’s claim in Chapter 27, Yu Yan, “Fables”16:

“If you refrain from saying, everything is even; the even is uneven with the saying, saying is

uneven with the even. [bu yan ze qi, qi yu yan bu qi]” (Graham 107). “Saying” (yan, speech,

language) is itself what disturbs the smooth field or surface (Laozi’s uncarved block) of Dao,

now seen as a kind of pre-linguistic (or potentially-linguistic, emerging-linguistic) but not

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supra-linguistic background. But we may find the second statement a bit more disorienting,

feel it comes at us from an unexpected “perspective”: “saying and the qi-even are not

qi-even with one another.” This implies that we would need another level or dimension of

qi-evenness (equality)—its “background perspective” perhaps17—by which to “measure” or

“model” (則ze) the relation (difference) between yan-saying and qi-evenness.

The conclusion from these two statements—“In saying he says nothing” [gu yue wu

yan]—is also striking. I interpret it thus: because it breaks or ruptures the surface of the

even (is uneven with the even), saying says nothing; that is, it can only “say” when it is

(even with) the even, with the (its own) background. But the mystical monist view will

assume this means a (retreat into) absolute Silence (Being as Silence, as expressed by

Silence); taking Dao as Background Noise may be a way of preserving Hansen’s

linguisticality and multiplicity of Dao (daos) while still remaining within what would seem

a fundamentally metaphysical (if not quite ontological) view of things. This “in saying he

says nothing” already implies Dao’s “negative development”— assuming, that is, that we

want being rather than nothing, that we want to say something. If we assume that Zhuangzi

values “saying nothing,” as of course he does in another sense—in the phrase’s

Gestalt-switched or “virtual-other” sense—then we are perhaps already moving “back” into

the background, moving in the other direction.

When Laozi speaks of the cultural-historical need to “return to the root” or “return to

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the origin”—to the Dao as pristine “uncarved block”—he is envisioning a return to the

harmony of a simpler society. He seems to see the marking of the block’s smooth surface by

the differentiations of rational thinking, of zhi-knowing and wei-acting, as part of a wider

“defacing,” a more totalized socio-cultural-historical decline away from that state of “pure

mind” which is also the initial state of the tian xia, heaven-under, “world.” Zhuangzi also

seems “nostalgic” for an original (or at least “more original”) Dao:

The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go?

To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed—so far, to

the end, where nothing can be added. Those at the next stage thought that things exist

but recognized no boundaries [封 feng] among them. Those at the next stage thought

there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong [是非 shi fei] Graham:

“That’s it, that’s not”]. Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured [虧

kui, lost, lacking, deficient] . . .18 (Watson 36-37)

Here we move from the originary stage or state of Nothing—no things, perhaps even

no-thought—to the state of a pure (dis)continuous “Thing” (there were things but no

feng-boundaries between them19), and from here to a state of separate “Things” (or perhaps

one continuously divisible Thing). But it is only in the next stage, where logical shi-fei

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oppositions appear, that Dao becomes kui (hurt, deficient, lost)—as in another story

Hun-dun (Chaos) is hurt and so dies when the (“logical”) openings are cut in him.20 Does

this mean that “language” only begins after the discrimination of things, with this level of

logical (shi/fei) cutting; is the level of “mere things” perhaps pre-linguistic in the sense I

have already suggested, as a sort of “noise”? Zhuangzi also asks, immediately following his

question as to whether we can distinguish yan-“words” from the kou-yin, “peeps of baby

birds”: “What is Dao hidden (隱 yin, darkened, hurt) by, that we have true and false (真偽

zhen/wei), what is Saying (言 yan, words) hidden by that we have shi/fei?” We will perhaps

most naturally read this yan-Saying as being equivalent to Dao, so that both questions are

being asked about the same (undiscriminated) “thing”: this clearly supports the notion that

Dao-Saying is pre-linguistic, where “fully” linguistic means embodying zhen/wei and shi/fei

distinctions. We could also see here two stages in Dao’s “development,” a stage of zhen/wei

differentiation (resulting in Saying) followed by one of shi/fei differentiation; then we might

still take primordial (“smooth”) Dao as pre-linguistic, call Saying “linguistic” and the

zhen/wei distinguished state “logical.” But it seems simpler to just take Dao as Saying here,

distinguishing only between a pre-linguistic (“saying” but not “logic”) and fully linguistic

(“logical”) state.

Similarly we have, in another passage: “The Way has never known boundaries (未始有

封 wei shi you feng, not yet begun to have boundaries), Saying (yan, words) has no

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constancy (未始有常 wei shi you chang).” Again, while one might be tempted to take the

Way and Saying as two different things, or Saying as a later developmental stage of the

Way—especially given the ostensibly negative connotations of “inconstancy”—it seems

easier to identify, as before, Way with Saying here, taking this unbounded or

undifferentiated Saying as a pre-linguistic background. The fact that Saying is not simply

inconstant but rather “not yet constant” implies after all that it is not the final stage; this

“not yet constant” could suggest lack of temporal boundaries, just as “not yet feng” suggests

lack of spatial ones. Dao as background noise would then be inconstant precisely because it

is a preliminary (pre-linguistic, pre-logical) stage out of which the later, more rationalized

(linguistic) stages are about to emerge; in a certain sense of the term background Dao is

“emergent,” the radio stations are potentially or virtually present within the static even if not

yet actually tuned in. We also get support for this sort of “emergent” model from the

original sense of feng-boundaries as a “sealing up of openings”: rather than a continuous

Thing which is free to keep “extending itself outward” we could picture this Dao as an

open-and-closed mixture (economy, text, language) which can’t be made “continuous” and

“determinate” as either something open (void, Nothing, Silence) or closed (Something).

And there is no reason after all to distinguish Dao’s non-fixity of meaning (semantic

indeterminacy) from either its spatial indeterminacy (not-yet-boundedness, the not-yet is

already temporal) or its temporal indeterminacy (inconstancy, impermanence).21

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This Dao then I see as being already yan-Saying but in an ambivalently pre-linguistic

sense, meaning Dao is already not silence but also not yet a full-fledged “rational

discourse”; it is the noise (the chui, wind and kou-yin, peeps of baby birds) out of which

“language” or “meaningful sounds” emerge. Zhuangzi’s uncarved surface or field of

undifferentiated language—“pure language” before it gets bian-discriminated into

self-opposed meanings (this/that, true/false, right/wrong)—is not the absolutely

undifferentiated, “smooth surface” of silence but rather the pre-differentiated, slightly

“rough”22 background noise that precedes language in the more proper sense. But the aspect

of Serres’ thought which particularly interests me here is, again, the notion that

super-ordered structures become redundant, just as formal logic is grounded in tautologies

(A=A) which “tell us nothing new”—or in effect “tell us nothing,” the highest level of the

truth that “by saying we say nothing”—and are thus redundant. I am suggesting that

Zhuangzi sees the this/that, true/false, right/wrong distinctions which “hurt” Dao—or

kui-lose or yin-hide Dao by “defacing,” obscuring the initial pristine purity of Dao’s

surface—as moving (negatively developing) Dao toward an extreme limit of hyper-rational

redundancy; but on Serres’ model this “limit” or saturation point, at which meaning has

become nonsense, in effect reverts back to or virtually becomes (as in a sort of

Gestalt-switch) the dark chaos of initial disorder. Yet if we try to read this negative

development of Dao in Serresian terms we are left with the obvious question: where do we

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this “reversion” at work, how does it work, in the Qi Wu Lun?

Rather than begin with actual cases of hyper-ordered or blankly chaotic discourse—I

will offer two examples in the following section—it seems best to first briefly address the

question of how this reversion from blank to dark chaos works. We might see it as the

function of tong-interchange, which means in effect focusing on the ambivalence

(equivocity) of the qi-even itself, or of that “one” into which the Way “makes all things”:

. . . the Way makes them all into one (道通唯一 Dao tong wei yi; Graham: “the

Way interchanges them and deems them one”). Their dividedness is their

completeness [qi fen ye, cheng ye; Graham: “their dividing is formation”]; their

completeness is their impairment [qi cheng yeh, hui yeh; Graham: “their formation

is dissolution”]. No thing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into one

again [fan wu wu cheng yu hui, fu tong wei yi; Graham: “all things whether

forming or dissolving in reverting interchange and are deemed to be one]. Only

the man who sees right through [知通 zhi tong] knows how to interchange [tong]

and deem them one; shi [“That’s it”] he does not use, but [寓 yu] finds for them

lodging-places in the usual. The ‘usual’ is the usable [庸也者,用也 yong ye zhe,

yong ye], the usable is the interchangeable [用也者, 通也 yong ye zhe, tong ye] . . .

(Watson 36, Graham 53-54)

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Here the crucial character is tong 通 “communication,” “passable” (Watson) or

“interchangeable” (Graham).23 We can take it in both a “horizontal” and a “vertical” sense.

In the horizontal sense the sage tong-interchanges things/meanings/discourses by finding for

them “lodging-places in the usual” (Graham). This pragmatic strategy (庸 yong, “usual” is

a modification of 用yong, “useful”) of yu, finding temporary places

(ostensibly “fixed” meanings) for all words/discourses, is really that strategy of “miming”

or “temporarily playing along with” shi-discriminating that Hansen refers to. It may also

have a close connection to what is called at the opening of Chapter 27 (Yu Yen, “Metaphor”)

zhi yan, “spillover saying”: this zhi is “a kind of vessel designed to tip and right itself when

filled too near the brim,” and zhi yan is “new every day, smooth it out on the whetstone of

Heaven [天倪 tian ni]” (Graham 106-107). Graham interprets this as “a fluid language

which keeps its equilibrium through changing meanings and viewpoints,” so that he who

uses it, and/or this “discursive practice” itself, may just as easily adopt one’s/it’s

“opponent’s” position as one’s/it’s own (107)—after all, it will all be smoothed out on the

surface of Dao.

But if we take this pragmatic yu-miming of “normal,” logically discriminating

shi-discourse as a sort of interim position between background Dao (dark chaos) and Dao’s

own hyper-ordering (blank chaos), then perhaps this “man who sees right through” [zhi tong,

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知通, “knows passing through,” “knows right through”24] sees, while pragmatically miming

shi-discourse, that ultimately this discourse becomes blankly chaotic and thus reverts to its

darkly chaotic background. We now have a vertical sense of tong-interchange: in its

limit-state of hyper-redundancy and information death, Dao/discourse, as “logical” oneness,

reverts to (its background in) “indefinite” oneness. That is, the sage wei-“sees” this wider or

more grounding oneness and so tong-“makes” this reversal/interchange, but we can also say

it is Dao itself that sees this and performs this way: Dao tong wei yi, “Dao interchanges all

things/meanings and deems them one,” where this “one” is the indefinite or unlimited one

of the darkly-chaotic background. Thus the sage’s (and/or Dao’s) discursive praxis would be

to adopt or yu-mime yong-everyday discourse, acting as if the world were made of rational

distinctions while in fact “deeming all things one” in (or against the background of) Dao.

Zhuangzi’s claim that “The ‘That’s it’ [shi-ing] . . . comes to an end; and when it is at an end,

that of which you do not know what is so of it you call the ‘Way’” (Graham 54) could also

imply the reversal from end to beginning: now that shi-ing has “come to an end” (A=A=A)

in the limit-state of terminal equilibrium, we enter a blank chaos which reverts (has already

reverted) to background Dao.

In Serresian terms we might also take this as a form of virtuality: zhi tong

(seeing-through, knowing-through) sees a virtual oneness—a “temporary order of

chaos”—at the highest level of (redundant) order, the level of blank chaos which is already

20

in effect a reversion or switch back to dark chaos. Yu as “metaphor” already suggests such a

virtuality, in the sense of momentary configurations, as in figurative language, or

attunements of static/background noise (see note 5). But perhaps we would need to see this

qi-evenness of “saying,” once it has become smoothed out on/against the dark-chaotic

discursive background, as a certain sort of “roughness” in relation to the “absolute”

qi-evenness of hyper-ordered discourse. The latter becomes for Serres (as a state of

maximally efficient communication between A and B) “information death” and settles into

“terminal equilibrium,” because a certain degree of noise is needed for any information

(rather than the blank A=A=A) to actually be communicated.25 The “roughness” of a

qi-even background Dao into which blank chaos has reverted suggests the possibility of

actual meaning rather than the death or “burning out” of meaning. This roughness also fits

the etymological sense of qi-even as (already) a kind of doubleness (the figure-ground

doubleness of “perspective”); it fits our sense of the initial wholeness of Dao as

indeterminate yet continuous thing, Hun Dun before holes were cut in him26, a “thing

confusedly formed” (wu hun cheng, Laozi 25), a “great clod (da kuai) that belches out

breath” (Zhuangzi 2). It also allows us another reading—taking background Dao as already

discursive, already the possibility of saying—of “saying is uneven (wu qi) with qi.”

This indeterminate or “rough” background Dao in a certain sense would itself mediate

between silence and blank chaos. Its spontaneous and chaotic speech/discourse

21

simultaneously points back toward silence (not-saying) and forward toward the redundant

“speech” of hyper-rationality, which has already entered the terminal equilibrium of

information death and so perhaps another form of silence. Thus again: “if you refrain from

saying, everything is qi-even; . . . saying is uneven (wu qi) with qi; . . . ‘in saying he says

nothing.’” Hyper-ordered sound/speech approaches a sort of virtual silence (blankness of

meaning), and background Dao mediates “in both directions” between silence and noise: on

one side the blank redundancy of hyper-rationality fan-reverts or tong-interchanges into

background noise; on the other side background Dao itself can, as noise, only be defined

against the background of a deeper (“darker”) silence.

Embedment, Recursion, Rhetoricity, Redundancy

Immediately after this “man who sees right through” passage Zhuangzi mentions the

problem of those who “wear out [their] brain trying to make things into one [wei yi] without

realizing that they are all the same” (Watson 36). The move toward hyper-order is precisely

a move toward “making things into one” through logical thinking or analysis, that is,

through shi-division. Yet this drive toward making things one again reverts, once it has

reached the extreme limit of logical division, to the background Dao: “The ‘That’s it’ . . .

comes to an end; and when it is at an end, that of which you do not know what is so of it

22

you call the ‘Way.’” To say “all are one” (yi) is after all not quite the same as saying “all are

the same” (同 tong 27 ): the latter suggests an originally heterogeneous mixture now

“homogenized,” not a logical-mathematical unity or identity; logical “oneness” suggests the

unity reached by first cutting holes (as in the story of Hun Dun) and not the initial

wholeness of a (Dao as) indeterminate yet continuous thing, a “thing confusedly formed”

(wu hun cheng, Laozi 25), a “great clod that belches out breath” (da kuai yi qi, Zhuangzi 2),

something slightly rough.

It is really this drive toward “making things one” that leads to certain sorts of

hyper-ordered discourses, or discursive structures, in the Qi Wu Lun. Information theory

posits, as we have seen, that without a certain degree of interruption by (background) static

or noise the hyper-efficient communication between A and B becomes the information death

of tautological redundancy; A=A now in effect becomes A=A=A, and we settle into a

terminal equilibrium state unless the interruption of noise allows us to “kick-start,” that is,

to “revert.” Indeed the most obvious form of blankly-chaotic discourse in Zhuangzi’s

second chapter may be that of an indefinitely recursive syntactic structure that leads to a

logical, epistemological, metaphysical conundrum. Such “uspension,” resulting from the

lack of any interruption, in an infinite regress is just what we have in the speculation on

“beginnings,” itself an attempt (or at least “mimed” or “feigned” attempt, yu-“figurative”

attempt) to achieve metaphysical certainty and totality, and in this sense to “wei yi”:

23

There is a beginning (shi, 始). There is a not yet beginning (wei shi, 未始) to be a

beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning.

There is being (yu, 有). There is nonbeing (wu, 無, nothing). There is a not yet

beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be

nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and non-being. But between this being and

non-being, I don’t really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have

just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said

something or whether it hasn’t said something. (Watson 38)

We can picture this recursive pattern of “before the beginning” on a linear time-line

(“. . . before X before Y before . . .”) but also within a spatial pattern; in the latter case we

are looking at the beginning as either the “field” (background) of empty space or as an

indeterminate “thing” (chaos, background).28 In either case we clearly have the problem of

an indefinite or infinite regress, one which could be compared with certain skeptical

dilemmas in Western philosophy and set in relation, perhaps, to Kant’s discussion of logical

antinomies and Hegel’s treatment of “bad infinity.” But what especially strikes one here,

what belongs more particularly to Zhuangzi’s own style, is the self-reflexive structure of

what might be called discursive or “rhetorical” embedment: “Now I have just said

24

something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether

it hasn’t said something.” The speaker is self-conscious of himself as a speaker (rhetor), one

whose own speech can “say something,” say its meaning. There are already at least three

epistemological-rhetorical levels—the speaker, the speech, what the speech “says”—with

the potential again for infinite (positive/negative) regress—what (the) speech says or does

not say can also say or not say something. Thus the structure “saying says” already

foregrounds language as a self-embedding or self-quoting system, a pattern of quoted

statements within wider quoted statements and so on indefinitely, and we might even have

the impression that the speaker is himself embedded within the “saying.”29

This rhetorical embedment would need to be located in relation to the logical

embedment of the potentially infinite recursive series of a “not yet beginning to be a not yet

beginning to be a not yet . . . ,” which leaves us suspended in a state of metaphysical

(spatio-temporal) indeterminacy. For this “saying” also has a certain temporal value, is itself

a sort of “beginning,” or perhaps a “not-yet-beginning” (to mean rather than to be). Indeed

this semantic problem of beginning to-mean (rather than the metaphysical beginning-to-be)

is precisely what is foregrounded by our notion of Dao as background noise out of which

individual “meanings” emerge. This conception of background Dao also suggests that it will

be the discursive or rhetorical pattern of embedment that takes priority here,

encompassing or embedding the metaphysical pattern. But this indefinite suspension in

25

“terminal equilibrium” of the regress is abruptly interrupted by Zhuangzi: “Suddenly there

is being and non-being. But between this being and non-being, I don’t really know which is

being and which is nonbeing.” By directly foregrounding the bi-polar or “horizontal”

indeterminacy of “being or not-being,” by putting us “between” the shi and fei, Zhuangzi in

a sense jumps back out of the terminal equilibrium of hyper-redundancy into the

indeterminate qi (smooth-and-rough)-background from which it (negatively) emerged.

Having now reached the end-point of Dao’s negative development, we might also see the

whole regress of the “not-yet-beginning” as infinitely (or infinitesimally) “backing us up”

toward such a background, one which we can in fact only “reach” by such a sudden leap out

of the tautological-redundant chain “X before Y before . . .” into “mere” bi-polar

indeterminacy.

That an overly-complex, self-embedded recursive structure essentially is (or reverts to)

“nonsense” is perhaps even clearer in a passage from the “Questions of T’ang” in the Liezi,

one also concerned with the problem of beginnings that might belong in the first chapter (on

“relativity”) of the Zhuangzi.30 Here a certain Xia Ge claims: “There is no ultimate [wu qi

無極, no extreme limit] in the beginning or end of things . . . The beginning may be the end

and the end may be the beginning. Who knows their order [紀, periodicity, record,

narration]?” (Chan 312) Xia then goes on to tie the indeterminacy of these two extreme

poles on a temporal continuum to the indeterminacy of the spatial limit (outer boundary) of

26

the universe:

“As to what exists outside of things or before the beginning of events, I do not know.

If there is nothing, then it is infinite [無則無極 wu ze wu qi; Graham: ‘what is

nothing is limitless’]. If there is something , then there must be a limit [有則有盡 yu

ze yu jin; ‘what is something is limited’] . . . But beyond infinity there is no more

infinity [無極之外復無無極 wu qi zhi wai fu wu wu qi] and within the unlimited

there is no more unlimitedness [無盡之中復無無盡 wu jin zhi zhong fu wu wu jin].

(Chan 312, Graham Disputers 80)

Here the indeterminacy of spatial limits, cast in terms of a potentially infinite

movement inward paralleling the movement outward, is set beside the indeterminacy of

temporal limits, that is, of beginning and end. May we then (as perhaps in a “Big Bang”

cosmology) correlate “beginning” with (ultimate) interiority and “end” with exteriority—or

might it go the other way as well? (“Who knows their order?” Perhaps it is also Einstein’s

question.) But the potential infinity of this movement inward and outward must be qualified.

On the most standard reading of the passage (e.g. Graham in Studies) this is a logical

dilemma of infinity: “outside (inside) the unlimited there can be no more unlimited,” as

there can only be one infinity; if there were two then the first would be limited, not infinite;

27

on the other hand if there is only one infinity then we may think it limited in another sense.

We could take it as a sort of Kantian antinomy of pure reason: reason pictures or thinks that

it pictures (here arises the problematics of reason and imagination in the Kantian sublime)

an “infinity” which must be one yet also cannot be “only” one. Hegel’s discussion of “bad

infinity,” arising in the context of that “negativity” which drives his dialectic, also comes to

mind here. In fact our own thinking about such a dilemma may go through a “forced

movement” that fluctuates between the thought of infinitude and that of finitude, as also

(correlatively) between the thought of exteriority and that of interiority. This becomes the

hyper-redundancy (nonsense) of an infinitely open-ended recursive series— “A or B or A or

B or A . . .”—which also has no clear “beginning” or “end.”

To complicate matters, Liezi’s key passage is interpreted in the reverse way by Wu and

Watson: “Beyond the unlimited another unlimited, within the inexhaustible another

inexhaustible.”31 This “version” in effect presents the same dilemma of infinity “the other

way around,” the question now becoming: “How can infinity be a discontinuous series of

infinities rather than one continuous infinity?” Or does this rupture between two infinities

appear even with the Chan/Graham reading, since one infinity (a wu qi) is going “out” and

another (a wu jin) is going (or coming) “in”? In fact, whether we take it as one infinity or a

multiplicity (infinite number) of infinities going out and in, we will still have this break; it is

really created by our own location (as thinking subject) “here in the middle.” That we have

28

in any case—as in the problem of whether “saying not-x” can itself “say something” in the

“not-yet-beginning” dilemma of the Qi Wu Lun—a meta-level here of knowing, one which

in a sense encompasses and indeed generates the embedded “logical” levels, is already clear

from the passage’s rhetorical frame, from Xia Ge’s (apparently rhetorical) question, “Who

knows the order . . . ?” That is, this “not-knowing the order” is already a kind of

indeterminacy—not-knowing as an “unlimited”—on another level, and it is this limitation

of human thinking which has created the “problem of infinity” in the first place, just as

Kant’s pure reason generates antinomies.

But if saying and knowing both “encompass” now the physical cosmos taken as an

“indefinite thing,” what is the relationship between saying and knowing themselves? Which

encompasses the other? Since the outer “bound” must be a “boundlessness” and therefore a

“not” (as in non-finitude, infinity), the question here becomes which is more likely: that we

could “say but not yet know” or “know but not yet say?” The whole thrust of my

“discursive” reading of Zhuangzi suggests the latter interpretation: the ultimate redundancy

of a hyper-ordered discourse signals its reversion to indeterminate background-discourse.

The grounding question with which we began, “What is yen-saying yin-hidden by that we

have shi and fei?” implies after all only that the rational distinctions of knowing carve up

the smooth surface of Dao/Saying, not that they contain it as might its own ultimate stage of

self-development, its own excessive “saying.” Coming back to our initial model of

29

background Dao, it seems that knowing is the mere negative development out of a

primordial “pre-linguistic” Dao, a saying/non-saying or “noisy” Dao; but knowing is still a

sort of interim state that is itself excessively ordered into that discursive “nonsense of

excess” which then reverts to the dark-chaotic background not just of “unknowability” but

of “unsayability.”

Another form of redundancy that will “revert” in the Qi Wu Lun is seen in the

“rhetoricity” of rhetorical questions. We remember the “bird-peeps” passage: “Words are

not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then

do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are

different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference or isn’t there?” (Watson

34) If we take these as unanswerable questions then we might say they put us into that zone

of horizontal or bi-polar indeterminacy which saved us from the infinite regress; in this case

the very undecidability is the heart of the “meaning” which we are after here, and which is a

function of the primordial and underlying background “noise” of all discourse. But in the

context of questioning there is a new and different problem: we could just as well take these

as rhetorical questions, whose answer (“No, they don’t say anything” and “No, there is no

difference”) is presupposed by the author, so that the question itself becomes a redundancy.

But this particular manifestation of blank chaos reverts to the dark-chaotic background

when we read these questions the other way, as open-ended and indeterminate. Such a

30

horizontal open-endedness, again, would need to be distinguished from the

“linear-temporal” open-endedness of the infinite regress, as too from the horizontal

redundancy (“Yes” is “yes” is “yes” . . . ) of a text which theoretically might become

nothing but rhetorical questions, a single rhetorical question, it’s total “meaning” reduced to

a single “yes” (or “no”).32

The actual problem in the text of the Qi Wu Lun, of course, is that Zhuangzi’s many

stylistic and emphatic “questions-to-the-reader” tend to be equivocally or undecidably

(indeterminately) rhetorical (predetermined) and unanswerable (indeterminate), suggesting

another sort of regress and another possible form of reversion. Reading the questions one

way we move in one direction, toward hyper-order and redundancy, reading them the other

way we move in the other direction, back into the (qi-rough) “equilibrium” of background

Dao. Yet the undecidability of “how to read them” arguably points us back toward, moves

us back into the background. It may be useful to briefly contrast this ambivalence or

impasse (aporia) of redundancy versus indeterminacy with the “arbitrarily assigned

answerability” of initially undecidable (unanswerable) questions presented in the parable of

the “sacred turtle” in chapter 26, Wai Wu, “External Things.” A white turtle has been caught

and shown to the king, “who could not decide whether to kill it or let it live and, being in

doubt, he consulted his diviners, who replied, “‘Kill the turtle and divine with it—it will

bring good luck.’ Accordingly the turtle was stripped of its shell, and of seventy-two holes

31

drilled in it for prognostication, not one failed to yield a true answer.’” (Watson 136)

The bitter irony here is that the king’s diviners are exercising a totally arbitrary power

in “reading” all the cracks—which appear when indentations drilled in the shell are

burned—as meaning either “yes” or “no,” but in any case as being the “correct answer” to

questions they themselves had asked. These randomly-appearing cracks are in fact the

closest we could wish to come to the pure “noise” of nature, a deeper level of “dark chaos”

than we have seen (or rather heard) even with the “peeps of baby birds” or the

cricket-and-frog chorus of a summer’s night—and yet precisely for this reason they are used

by diviners to “know the truth.” Such divination in fact seeks out the deepest level of noise

as the source of truth and applies to it the greatest arbitrariness of interpretation.33 This

arbitrariness hides or depends upon a pure randomness, the basis of its violence. Serres also

speaks (in The Parasite) of the potential violence, used for authoritarian control, of

blank-chaotic super-“order” and its maximally-efficient “communication,” whose mere

redundancy here appears in the form of a pre-determined “dialogue” between A and B:

“Is . . . ?” “Yes.” / “Is . . . ?” “No.”

We have “holes” of another kind right at the beginning of the Qi Wu Lun, and they are

read by Wu Kuang-Ming specifically as “questions,” or in the light/darkness of

“questioning.” These are the earth’s caves in the “Piping of Heaven and Earth” passage:

32

Tzu-ch’i said, “The Great Clod (da kuei) belches out breath and its name is wind.

So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand

hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them . . . ? . . . [T]here are huge trees . . .

with hollows and openings . . . . They roar like waves . . . .”

Tzu-yu said, “By the piping of earth, then, you mean simply [the sound of] these

hollows, and by the piping of man [the sound of] flutes and whistles. But may I ask

about the piping of Heaven?”

Tzu-ch’I said, “Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each

can be itself—all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?”

(Watson 31-32)

Watson (32) in his note: “Heaven is not something distinct from earth and man, but a name

applied to the natural and spontaneous functioning of the two.” Graham (49): “[This]

parable . . . compares the conflicting utterances of philosophers to the different notes blown by

the same breath . . . ; don’t try to decide between their opinions, listen to Heaven who breathes

through them.” If we take this Heaven as background Dao then it simply means all men “make

sounds” when they speak, they have this much in common. But this “sound” is actually

nothing but the holes/wind relationship (duality, virtuality) emphasized by Wu (187): “Holes

are something negative, a lack; the wind is something invisible, the power of a no-thing. And

33

our questions are also a lack, asking to be filled . . . with something like the wind.”

While Wu might be moving here very subtly toward a sort of Heideggerian view, taking

the “question of Being” as that which (like the piping of Heaven) “opens” Being into the

ontological difference, this notion of question-filled-by-answer is also interesting when, as

“communication” or “dialogue,” we try to see it from a Serresian perspective. This takes us

back to the problem of redundancy: if the questions can too easily be answered—if in the

limit-case they are rhetorical questions—then we are reduced to the nonsense of blank chaos,

which reverts to the dark-chaotic background, the “evening out” of sound as mere noise; if on

the other hand they are (as we may well expect) “unanswerable”—lacking any clear criterion

by which we might answer them, since any such criterion may lead to an infinite regress of

meta-languages—then it seems that have perhaps not left this background in the first place.

But here we are foregrounding not the heaven-earth difference but the wind-holes (answer-

question) difference; or does wind correlate with heaven and holes with earth? If we look

specifically at the heaven-earth difference here then we might say the pattern of redundancy

“equates” heaven-earth (the “maximum communica- tion” of A = A = A . . .) while that of

indeterminacy emphasizes their difference, the space between them. (In Laozi 6 Dao is the

“tian-di zhi jian,” heaven-earth betweenness”; the Greek xaos, chaos in fact originally means

“gap” or “gaping mouth.”)34

34

Dao and Yin 隱 - “Virtuality”

The line translated by Graham as “By what is the Way hidden by, that there should be a

genuine or a false?” is rendered by Watson, “What does the Way rely upon, that we have

true and false?” That is, Watson reads the yin35 here as “rely” and notes (34): “Following

the interpretation of Chang Ping-lin. The older interpretation of yin here and in the

following sentences is, ‘What is the Way hidden by,’ etc.” The more immediate sense of yin

is indeed “hide,” “cover,” “obscure” (as verb and adjective), which already suggests a

doubleness, a kind of “virtual” relationship between two surfaces, one of which covers and

shades the other so that the latter is the cover’s “shadow.” It is not too great a leap to think

of the “shadow” as “depending on” the body that shadows it, which is indeed the very

figure that introduces the hu die meng, butterfly dream at the end of the Qi Wu Lun:

Penumbra said to Shadow, “A little while ago you were walking and now you’re

standing still; a little while ago you were sitting and now you’re standing up. Why this

lack of independent action? [he qi wu te cao, Graham 61: ‘Why don’t you make up

your mind to do one thing or the other?’]”36

35

Shadow said, “Do I have to wait for something before I can be like this? [Wu you

dai er ran zhe ye? Graham: ‘Is it that there is something on which I depend to be so?’]

Does what I wait for also have to wait for something before it can be like this?

[Graham: ‘And does what I depend on too depend on something else to be so?’]”

Watson here assumes the standard meaning of dai (“wait”) while Graham shifts to

“depend on.”37 The point is that in both of these passages—the yin passage and the dai

passage—we have a sense of doubleness, a sense that the shadow-like background “relies

on” its model or ground precisely because it is yin-darkened or yin-hidden by it. This raises

the problem of the ambivalence of background Dao itself: is this background the deepest

and truest “ground,” or is it rather the mere virtuality of yin-hiddenness as yin-dependence?

We have been trying to suggest a model according to which a hyper-ordered and thus

redundant Dao/discourse becomes a merely “virtual order” and thus reverts to the/its

chaotic background. And yet the “interim” stage of yong-everyday discourse—a

yong-useful discourse which performs the horizontal tong-interchange of shi/fei, “this” and

“that,” a zhi yan, spillover saying which pragmatically yu-mimes the “real” shi-ing—is

already aware of its own “virtuality” in relation to what might have been a “real” shi-ing; it

is only in taking itself too seriously as a “logic,” a “truthful” form of demarcation or shi-ing,

that it reaches the limit-stage of excessive redundancy where the chaotic background

36

appears as what is most “real” and, as mere virtual image or simulacrum of order, it must

revert to the background. Or perhaps we could say the state of excessive order and

“information death” is simply the self-consciously “virtual” spillover saying—the

tong-interchanging, provisional and pragmatic everyday discourse—whose “form” as pure

overflow is now objectified, formalized.

Redundancy is indeed a form of overflow—redundare means “overflow,” the Latin

root undare is related to “water”—as excessive “completeness” or “filling-in,” as opposed

to the very different “unlimitedness” of a qi-rough chaotic background filled with gaps or

spaces. This is the contrast between the “porousness” (unevenness) of static on the radio and

the evenness or solidity of a purely continuous sound (“Beeeee,” A = A = A), that of a single

station tuned-in or refined to the limit-point. But the overflowing of the smooth solidity of

blank chaos is perhaps already its reversion to the “porous” background, whose spaces may

suggest the “caves” or “holes” of the Piping passage but also the praxis of Cook Ting

carving his ox:

“There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness.

If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of

room—more than enough for the blade to play about in. That’s why after nineteen

years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.”

37

(Watson 47)

The “spaces-between” can be used by the cook because his knife becomes small

enough to fit into (or indeed create) them; the pragmatic skill or knack of everyday

discourse means constant awareness of the all-pervasive, porous background Dao, into

which we ourselves (our yen-words, discourses) will always easily “fit,” as do the tuned-in

stations once they are reabsorbed and thus disappear into background noise. The move back

toward/into this background is a move toward/into greater space-between, perhaps into an

“indefinitely wide” gap or space-between. (Chaos, Greek xaiein means originally “yawning

gap,” “abyss.”) Yet as physics also tells us, everything is relative: if we ourselves become

infinitely small the space surrounding us will become infinitely large. The praxis which

arguably “contains” all other praxes in Zhuangzi is that of “big saying,” a discourse which

can become so infinitely or indefinitely “large” because the speaker himself knows he is

already “within” it.38 This big saying is interpreted by Zhuangzi via a parable which

compares this too-wide or too deep (too-“abstract,” “stretched-out”) metaphysical discourse

with the deep ground beneath our feet, now suddenly taken away:

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, “Your words are useless [yan wu yong]!”

Chuang Tzu said, “A man has to understand the useless before you can talk to him about

38

the useful. The earth is certainly vast and broad, though a man uses no more of it than the

area he puts his feet on. If, however, you were to dig away all the earth around his feet

until you reached the Yellow Springs, then would the man still be able to make use of it?”

“No, it would be useless [wu yong],” said Hui Tzu.

“It is obvious, then,” said Chuang Tzu, “that the useless has its use [無用之為用 wu

yong zhi wei yong].” (Watson 137)

It is only when the deeper ground is withdrawn, when it is absent that we see the

“usefulness of the useless.” We needed this ground-beneath-the-ground (grounding- or

groundless-ground of a “too-indefinite” (unlimited) meta- physical discourse all along, to

support the ground (discourse) we stand on; yet we did not know this for the deeper ground

was always too far away, yin-hidden beneath our immediate ground. The more immediately

“pragmatic” (as well as playful, paradoxical, ironic) point is that the vital usefulness of this

underlying ground can only become clear to us once it is taken away, thus becoming truly

“useless” since now we plunge to our deaths. A Heideggerian (and perhaps Wu-ian) reading

will fit insofar as it can speak of Urgrunds, Ungrunds, Abgrunds (Introduction to

Metaphysics) and groundless-grounds, and insofar as it will see the “question of being” as

an open space, the space of “opening into Being” which thereby negates or undermines

Being yet gives meaning to the very horizon of its possible meaning. But we can also look

39

at Wu’s caves-as-questions interpretation of the Piping passage in terms of communication

theory: the dialogue between A and B, which would potentially become blankly chaotic,

gets interrupted by the “questioning” (putting-into-question) of the noisy background, now

seen as the indefinitely “porous” surface of background noise; the emphasis on horizontality

(gaps in a smooth surface) does after all not preclude a certain potential for vertical

“disappearance”—of sound, meaning, logical demarcations.39

The excessive usefulness of shi-ing, which perhaps is allowed to emerge once shi-ing

is taken too seriously, becomes the useless redundancy (useless usefulness, excessive

ordering) of blank chaos; that noise (useful uselessness) which interrupts the too-efficient

tong-interchange or tong-communication of meaning is the dark chaos into which blank

chaos reverts or “falls.” But the crucial point of communication (or information) theory is

that the interruption of communication (of meaning) by noise is necessary in order for new

meaning to emerge. The “biggest saying” (most abstract, boundless, indefinite “discourse”)

offers after all, like static on the radio, infinite potential (via all its possible tunings-in,

fillings-in of its numerous gaps) for sounds/meanings to emerge. It might then seem that not

to speak, not to say anything at all would be best—“If you refrain from saying, everything is

qi-even”—insofar as silence is still more boundless than speech, encompasses speech. Yet

what we really need is qi-roughness, for it will be difficult to interrupt and renew by

remaining silent; silence is too extreme, too absolute; we need rather to hum40, or perhaps

40

chirp like human birds.

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43

NOTES

1 Scholarly consensus “regards the thirty-three chapters of this text to be composite—the product of several if not

many hands” (Ames, Wandering 1) so there may be conflicting views on some of the key issues. But the traditional

division of the book into three sections by Kuo Hsiang (d. A.D. 312)—the first seven “inner,” followed by fifteen

“outer” and eleven “miscellaneous” chapters—along with the assumption that a certain fourth century B.C.E. 莊子

Zhuangzi or 莊周 Zhuang Zhou, for whom the whole book is named (with whom it is associated), himself wrote at

least the first seven, seems not yet to have been irrevocably overthrown. I will assume this here. The only passages

which are not in Zhuangzi 1, 2 or 3 that I will be looking at in this paper are in 25, 26, 27, and are prominently featured

in Graham’s own Chapter 8: “Passages related to the Inner chapters” (100-111); that is, I am assuming these may be

Zhuangzi’s own reflections. I will discuss one passage from the Liezi which may belong in Zhuangzi 1, though this is

not certain (see note 30). When I refer to Zhuangzi I am thinking of the author; by (the) Zhuangzi I mean the book.

2 Just 是 shi in the original text.

3 It is above all for its “openness” that I revert to Hansen’s early-1980’s reading here; neither his (very similar) later

reading in A Daoist Theory (1992) nor various other interpretations of Zhuangzi in the past ten years can in my opinion

“surpass” this one. There seems to be a general tendency toward “positive” (and “ethical”) readings; while the 1994

PEW essays by Kjellberg and Raphalls compare Zhuangzi’s skepticism and relativism to those of Sextus Empiricus

and Socrates in the Theaetetus, focusing on the issue of what these terms actually mean in the Daoist text, Zhuangzi’s

skepticism and relativism are more radically questioned, and/or redefined, by more recent studies. Thus for example

the articles in the 1996 Essays edited by Ivanhoe are essentially, in the words of Don Levi (reviewing it in PEW 49.4,

44

1999, p. 529), “promoting skepticism as therapy for a variety of problems . . . ” (a position whose logical coherence

Levi questions), and those in the 1998 Wandering at Ease edited by Ames tend to emphasize Zhuangzi’s positive and

pragmatic view of life, his concern with ethics in a broad sense (one that includes personhood, environment, ethos), his

notion of “knowing” as something that presupposes a field wider than that of subject-object (or indeed of all dualisms),

his stress on special knacks or skills for survival and long life (pragmatism again), his many forms of liberating or

transformative humor. This “anti-negative-skeptical turn” is perhaps nothing new: Moeller’s 1999 PEW essay on the

butterfly dream, arguing that skeptical interpretations of the passage are deluded, returns to Guo Xiang’s reading.

Although I (presumably like Hansen) have no problem with any of these views—how could I if “all is smoothed

out on the whetstone of heaven” [he yi t’ian ni 和以天倪, Graham 106]?—I do tend to (perhaps naively) assume that

the main thrust of many passages in the Zhuangzi, and certainly in the Qi Wu Lun, is something too “simple” to be

considered a formal philosophical “position”: we should just relax (and perhaps like Zi-qi “lose ourselves”), not worry

about all the troublesome problems (including logical distinctions) that constantly appear in life—or at least not take

them too seriously. That is, even though we have to more or less yu-“mime” or “play along with” (Hansen) all the

logical shi-ing for pragmatic purposes (survival, long life) we need not take all this very seriously, for finally it is all

(literally) “nonsense,” not distinguishable form the “peeps of baby birds.” (Actually Nietzsche’s view of “logic” at the

opening of Beyond Good and Evil is not so different from this: it is a “truthful lie,” one necessary for survival.)

I would thus tend to foreground relaxation and (like Sellmann in Wandering) humor above all else. The humor is

closely tied to Zhuangzi’s sense of pathos: we are nothing but “music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in

dampness” (Watson 33; this “parasite” as well as the music/holes has possible implications of Serresian “noise”), we

45

lack any identity or ground, after we die we may well wonder why we had to be born in the first place; in other words,

life is a joke, it is quite meaningless but we can enjoy this meaninglessness. In fact I tend to read Zhuangzi as I would

read Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett—who also, on Deleuze’s reading in “He Stuttered,” generates nonsensical tautological

redundancies at the “edge of language” and thus makes “the whole language-system vibrate”—or Shakespeare, whose

Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull and calls Yorick “a fellow of infinite jest.” (That literature is not really distinguishable

from philosophy, clear enough already in the Pre- Socratics, Nietzsche and the later Heidegger, is of course a crucial

point in Derrida and to a degree in all “poststructuralism”; see Hayles’ perspective in note 5.) To the extent that certain

readings want to clarify the shi-“positions” that Zhuangzi is or is not taking, the undertaking is perhaps itself “laugh-

able”—in the face, that is, of imminent death and nothingness. (Shakespeare and Beckett: tragic as comic.)

Yet here I am not arguing for any such “overview” of Zhuangzi—or any view put in such philosophical terms as

(negative or positive) skepticism, pragmatism, the assertion of personhood, spontaneity, a transcending comic ab-

surdity or (Schlegel) irony—even if the last comes nearer to my own subjective view of the text. Rather this paper is

an interpretation of Zhuangzi’s Dao, one grounded in a “rhetorical” (if not quite “literary”) reading of the Qi Wu Lun

that attempts to clarify certain “discourses” within it and their inter-relationship—with possible implications for

looking at the text in relation to Serres, chaos theory in physics and information (or communication) theory.

4 See the later discussion.

5 In this context the etymology of “noise” is suggestive: it comes from the Latin nausea, from Greek nautia,

“seasickness,” connoting a general sense of confusion, shouting or clamor.

6 This is an over-simplification (and/or over-specification) not only of Serres but of a rather complex field. Hayles (12)

46

speaks of the two main “branches” of chaos theory: once concerned with “the order hidden within chaotic systems”

and the other with the “order that arises out of chaotic systems.” Two key notions (images, tropes) regarding concealed

order are those of the strange attractor and recursive symmetry. The “attractor” (Hayles 8-9) is “any point of a system’s

cycle that seems to attract the system to it. The midpoint of a pendulum’s path is an example. A pendulum, no longer

pushed, spontaneously returns to this point.” Analysis of attractors involves mapping such positions or “phases” onto a

sort of second-order mathematical space (“phase space”). But the problem of revealing patterns within the data leads

to that of “the mode of conception necessary to bring the patterns into view” (10), seen now in terms of recursive sym-

metry. “A figure or system displays recursive symmetry when the same general form is repeated across many different

length scales . . . . The importance of recursive symmetry to complex systems derives from the kind of perspective re-

quired to see the predictability [of repetition] that lies hidden within their unpredictable evolutions” (10). The science

of chaos “provides a new way to think about order, conceptualizing it not as a totalized condition but as the replication

of symmetries that also allows for asymmetries and unpredictabilities. In this it is akin to poststructuralism . . . .” (11).

A foundational text for the other branch of chaos theory is Prigogine and Stenger’s Order Out of Chaos, in which

the second law of thermodynamics is reconceptualized. This law embodies Kelvin’s notion that in every real heat ex-

change “some heat is always lost to useful purposes” so that we have a “universal tendency toward dissipation,” ex-

pansion and increased randomness; finally “temperature would . . . stabilize at slightly above absolute zero. . . . Prigo-

gine and Stengers argue against this traditional view. They envision entropy as an engine driving the world toward in-

creasing complexity rather than toward death. They calculate that in systems far from [terminal] equilibrium, entropy

production is so high that local decreases in entropy can take place without violating the second law. Under certain cir-

47

cumstances, this mechanism allows a system to engage in spontaneous self-organization. . . . [suggesting that] the uni-

verse has a capacity to renew itself. Recently [they] have extended this vision to cosmology . . . . They argue that

before the Big Bang there was a quantum vacuum, and that fluctuations in it brought into existence the aboriginal

matter of the universe. Thus the ‘order out of chaos’ scenario is extended to cosmogonic proportions” (13-14).

Serres combines both of these branches and develops them in relation to information (or communication) theory:

now we can see as an interrupting “noise” (see later note) that chaotic disorder which “renews” an order that has

reached a state of terminal equilibrium. For the purposes of my reading of the Zhuangzi this renewal of order by dis-

order, viewed (as by Serres) as a sort of reversion or switch of order back to disorder, is crucial. Also crucial is the

notion of recursive symmetry mentioned above, particularly the “interpretation” of this recursion as one that involves

“the mode of conceptualizing necessary to bring the patterns into view.” (See the later discussion of Zhuangzi’s

recursive epistemological-discursive structures or patterns.)

7 One is tempted to say here “directions of flow,” but then this second-order flow would need to be distinguished from

the first-order flow of the initial (and final) “chaotic atomic flows.”

8 One version of cosmological Big Bang theory says that the universe keeps expanding toward greater randomness (a

function of entropic heat-loss) until it reaches the stage of “terminal equilibrium” (see note 5), at which point it will

commence to contract back again to the (its) initial, most densely-formed “core.” But in the model of Dao I am sug-

gesting here we begin in effect from this “expanded” state as chaotic background-Dao—which could as well be seen in

terms of Prigogine’s notion of “pre-original chaos” (note 5)—and move out from it toward a state of hyper-order (max-

imum density, redundancy).The latter is of course not taken as core or origin but as a Serresian variation on the term-

48

inal equilibrium of classical entropy theory, one which sees this as maximum order rather than maximum disorder. (An

“expanded” background might also suggest Zhuangzi’s words that are for Huizi “too big” and thus “useless.”) In their

“Postface” (“Dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius”) to Serres’ Hermes, Prirogine and Stengers claim that the “major

problematic of Serres’ work” is also “what is at stake” in Leibniz, namely, “the assumption that the passage from local

to global is always [with every monad] possible,” which implies a fully integrable and deterministic world/cosmos; in

a sense Serres moves between the Leibnizian system and Lucretius’ “rationalism of ancient atomism,” with its primor-

dial atomic flow (“fall of atoms”) that commences to self-order once it hits an “angle” (the clinamen) and thus starts to

self-repeat or reduplicate. Ames’ comparison (“Nietzsche’s Will to Power”) of the Taoist 德 “virtuality”— “power”

but also “self-displacement”—with the Nietzschean interplay of forces, in the context of the point-field relationship

and “aesthetic perspectivism,” might also be pursued in relation to this Leibnizian and Lucretian (not to mention

Serresian and perhaps also Deleuzian) field-dynamics, and the enduring problem of local-global interaction.

9 In one model this is because excessive order only “mimes” order. Or: the process of ordering was always merely

mimetic (“virtual”), but at the limit-point where reversal to disorder must occur, this mimesis has become transparent.

10 A good way to test the truth of this would be to ask people, “Did you know that this pen is a pen?”

11 Combining certain elements from both branches of chaos theory (note 5), Serres sees noise as a “parasite” (literally

“beside the grain”) which, as the third party, disrupts (interrupts) the communication between A and B; this interrup-

tion of hyper-order by disorder allows for the renewal of order. In Hermes and The Parasite Serres also suggests that

late-capitalist societies and (their perhaps correlative) fascist military “orders” demand super-efficiency (A=A, no

noise to block the message) in their systems of communication. But since such super-rationality ends in the blank

49

chaos of information death it will self-destruct unless interrupted, kick-started, renewed by a minimal amount of

(creative) “noise.” (There cannot be too much noise or the “signal” is destroyed in another way.) We might think here,

in addition to structures of political control and high-tech warfare where there is “no room for error,” of “Microsoft,

Inc.” and advertising/mass media, perhaps even of a cultural “postmodernism” which is by definition self-parodic and

thus redundant As White puts it (Hayles 267-268): “It turns out that the model for stochastic self-organization from

chaos applies not only to physical and biological systems but describes equally well the production of meaning from

noise. From a martial perspective successful communication between two interlocutors depends on the exclusion of a

third person . . . who threatens constantly to disrupt the transmission of messages” (Hermes 67). Since the optimum

performance of any system depends upon communicative transparency, noise must be eliminated. . . . Information,

understood in Gregory Bateson’s phrase as the “difference that makes a difference,” is excluded in favor of informa-

tion-free, wholly redundant messages. The system endlessly reiterates, endlessly ratifies itself. But such a system,

however self-coherent or optimally efficient, is nevertheless doomed to entropic degradation. Like any closed system,

it can only run down. The achievement of redundancy—when everything that needs to be said has already been said—

is analogous to entropic homogeneity when matter-energy settles into terminal equilibrium. In cultural systems, just as

in physical systems, noise or chaos amounts to a force for renewal. Serres thus imagines a “parasite”—precisely, static

in a communication channel who intervenes . . . . By perturbing the routine exchange of messages, the parasite can

provoke the production of novelty. The parasite’s introduction of confusion into a logically closed system enables the

generation of alternative logics. Like a “simple fluctuation, a chance event, a circumstance,” noise to can produce a

new system of meani